Backlog refinement meeting May 5th 2015

Summary:

1. Check-in
We welcomed Paweł and Marie-Louise to the team:

Paweł is Socialsquare’s new full-stack programming developer, who will be working on the project, mainly contributing code approximately 30 hours per sprint, on behalf of Socialsquare. He has strong background in Python programming, thus an optimal candidate for the technology preliminary picked by the team for the first sprint. He will be part of Blue Team.

Marie-Louise is a service designer, working at Socialsquare, who will work in user research and concept development as part of the Green Team.

2. New project website
Andreas introduced the new website for the project with a summary of the background, organisation, teams and tools of the project. You can find it here. If you have any comments, questions or suggestions. Get in touch with him on Slack. We’ve also set up Slack so that interested developers can request an invitation and join in without having to send an email, hopefully lowering the barrier to get more people involved.

3. Introduction to Pivotal Tracker
Early use of Taiga as our tool for the product backlog has given some frustration. It doesn’t really fit with the process that we’re trying to follow. And there is a set of small UI bugs and other inconveniences. We picked initially because it was open source, and because we thought it would prohibitively expensive to use Pivotal Tracker, which Socialsquare usually uses. But we have found out that Pivotal Tracker is free for public open source projects. So we made the decision to switch from Taiga to Pivotal, starting as of now.
We know it’s a little confusing with all these new tools and platforms, but as we’re still in the initial phase, where few people have gotten started using Taiga, we thought it would be okay to do. We won’t introduce or change any more tools from now on, promise!

4. Backlog refinement
We spent some time going over the product backlog, defining and refining user stories for the Blue Team to work on. You can find these on Pivotal Tracker.

Furthermore, we talked about which research questions that Green Team should focus on in this and the coming sprint. We focused on two bigger questions:

What works well and what doesn’t work well with the existing membership solutions used by the food coops today?

What is the existing user experience for new members/users getting onboarded in the food coops today?

Martin and Marie-Louise will work with developing a series of more specific sub-questions for each of these research questions. And will plan a field trip to one of the departments of KBHFF this coming Wednesday the 13th. If you are interested in joining in or helping with this work, get in touch with them on Slack.

6. Upcoming meetings
For the past few meetings, we’ve tried finding the best time/date via doodle. But doodling the meeting dates doesn’t appear to increase participation. So from now on, we’re are settling on having project meetings every second Monday at 18.00 at Socialsquare HQ in Vestergade 20C.
Since we’re working with 4-week sprints, this will allow us to have meetings every two weeks with focus on Backlog Refinement and Sprint Review/Planning, alternately.

That means that:

On Monday May 18th we’ll have Sprint 1 Review and Sprint 2 Planning.

On Monday June 1st, we’ll have Backlog Refinement Meeting.

On Monday June 15th we’ll have Sprint 2 Review and Sprint 3 Planning.

And so forth (though, we’ll probably have to figure out something different for July)